Revolutionary Mothering Love on the Front Lines

Alexis Pauline Gumbs was the first person to dig through the archives of several radical black feminist mothers including June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and Toni Cade Bambara while writing her dissertation We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism, a 500-page work. Alexis was named one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World in 2009, a Reproductive Reality Check Shero, and a Black Woman Rising nominee in 2010, and was awarded one of the first ever Too Sexy for 501c3 trophies in 2011! Alexis’s work as co-creator of the Mobile Homecoming experiential archive and documentary project has been featured in Curve magazine, the Huffington Post, in Durham Magazine and on NPR.

China Martens is a writer, glamazon, and empty-nest low-income anti-racist white radical single mother. She is the author of The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends and Others (Atomic Book Company, 2007), and coeditor of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities (PM Press, 2012). Since 2003, China has cofacilitated numerous workshops to create support for parents and children in activist and radical communities at universities, conferences, and healing spaces across the United States and Canada including the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Conference, Allied Media Conference, and book fairs from Montreal to New Orleans; Minneapolis to Santa Fe; and New York City to San Francisco. She also was a cofounder of Kidz City, a radical childcare collective in Baltimore (2009–2013) and is connected to a national circle of radical childcare collectives established at the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit.

Mai’a Williams is the creator and director of Water Studio, which supports and co-creates with underground community artists and revolutionaries in Cairo, Egypt, and she organizes with the Revolutionary Youth Councils of Cairo, which were among the leading forces during the 2011 ouster of Mubarak. It was her living and working with Palestinian, Congolese, and Central American indigenous mothers in resistance communities, that initially inspired her to become a mother and continues to guide her as she practices this life-giving work called radical mothering. Her essays, short stories and poetry have been published in make/shift, Mamaphiles, Tenacious, Popshot, Woman’s Work, Lilith Devotional, and Colored Girls. She is the instigator of the Outlaw Midwives movement, zines, and blog, which shifts the discourse around birth, life, death, and healing by offering a vision of radical empowerment and accountability. In 2008, she published the anthology Revolutionary Motherhood, a collection of writing and visual art about mothering on the margins, which became the inspiration for Revolutionary Mothering.